Second Skin (New Directions Paperbook), page 21
“Cassandra gets her sea legs from her mother,” I said, but the sea was against me, the Old Man of the Sea was against me, and the waves smelled like salted fish and the engine smelled of raw gasoline and Jomo was still crouching high on the stem and watching me. And all at once I was unable to take my eyes off him: Jomo going up, Jomo going down, up and down, Jomo swaying off to starboard, Jomo swinging back to port, and holding his hook on high where I could see it and aiming the bill of the baseball cap in my direction and fingering his sideburns now and then but keeping his little black eyes on mine and sitting still but sailing all over the place. Without moving his head he spit between his teeth and the long curve of the spittle, as it reached out on the wind, was superimposed against Jomo’s unpredictable motion and dark anxious face. And then I heard him.
“You don’t look too good,” he said. “Don’t feel good, do you? Why don’t you go below? Always go below if you don’t feel good. Here, let me help you down….”
Even as the Peter Poor pitched out from under me, Jomo spit one more time and then hopped off the stem, carefully, without effort, and approached me, came my way with his quick black eyes and on his forehead a sympathetic frown. Jomo with his hot advice, his hot concern for my comfort.
“You want to try sleeping,” he said. “Try can you get to sleep and see if I’m not right.”
It sounded good. I was bruised, hot, wet, sleepy, and my mouth was full of salt. Salt and a little floating bile. My face and fingers were wrinkled, puckered, as if I had spent the morning in a tepid bath. And the red sun had turned to gold and was hot in my eyes.
“Jomo,” I murmured, “there’s no dinghy, what do you think of that.? But the life jackets, Jomo, point them out to me, will you?”
And roughly, stuffing me into the little wooden companion-way: “You ain’t going to need no dinghy nor no lifejackets neither…. Now put your feet on the rungs.”
So I went down. I went down heavily, a man of oilskins and battered joints, while Jomo stayed kneeling in the open companionway with his arms folded and his chin on his arms—“I got to see this,” I heard him say over his shoulder—watching until my feet touched something solid and I fell around facing the cabin and managed to hold myself upright with one hand still on the ladder.
Pots and pans and beer bottles were rolling around on the floor. Two narrow bunks were heaped high with rough tumbled blankets and a pair of long black rubber hip boots. Little portholes were screwed tightly shut, the exhaust of the gasoline engine was seeping furiously through a leaking bulkhead, and in front of me, directly in front of me and hanging down from a hook and swaying left and right, a large black lace brassiere with enormous cups and broad elasticized band and thin black straps was swaying right and left from a hook screwed into the cabin ceiling.
“Jomo,” I said, “what’s that?”
“Never you mind what it is. Just leave it alone.”
Water on the portholes, stink of the engine, rattle of tin and glass going up and down the floor, long comfortable endless pendulum swinging of her black brassiere and: “But, Jomo, what about the owner?”
“Don’t you worry about the owner. She’s coming back to get that thing. Don’t worry.”
And then: “Jomo. I’m going to be sick…"
“Well, hot damn, just hike yourself up here on deck,” laughing over his shoulder, gesturing, then scowling down at me again through the dodging companionway, “just drag ass, now, I can’t let you puke all over my cabin.”
I got my head and shoulders up through the hole and into the open air in time to see Captain Red and Cassandra sitting side by side on the thwart and opening our brown paper bag of sandwiches, got there in time to see the wax paper flying off on the wind and one white sandwich entering the big red mouth and the other white sandwich entering Cassandra’s mouth. Then they were smiling and chewing and I was hanging my head into darkness that was like the ocean itself and trying to keep the vomit off the fresh yellow bulging breast of my borrowed oilskin coat.
Third occasion of my adult life when my own pampered stomach tried to cast me out. Third time I threw up the very flux of the man, and for a moment, only a moment in the darkness of a cold ocean, I couldn’t help remembering the blonde prostitute on Second Avenue who held my forehead in the middle of the night and shared my spasms, because now I was stuffed into oilskins and slung up in a tight companionway and retching, vomiting, gasping between contractions, and there was no one to hold my forehead now. But it was the sea that had done this to me, only the wide sea, and in the drowsy and then electrified intervals of my seasickness I knew there would be no relief until they carried me ashore at last.
Red was standing in front of Cassandra now, my head was rolling, for some reason Jomo was at the wheel and the sea, the wide dark sea, was covered with little sharp bright pieces of tin and I saw them flashing, heard them clattering, clashing on all sides of the Peter Poor. The drops on my chin were tickling me and I couldn’t move; I felt as if I had been whacked on the stomach with a rolled-up newspaper soaked in brine.
Then blackness. Clap of pain in the head and blackness. Mishap with the boom? Victim of a falling block? One of the running lights shaken loose or a length of chain? But I knew full well that it was Bub because my eyes returned suddenly to tears and sight returned, settled again into bright images of the yellow oilskin, the hook at the wheel, the stern half-buried and shipping water, and somehow I accounted for them and knew suddenly what had become of Bub, could feel him where he crouched above me on the cabin roof and held upraised the old tire iron which they used as a lever to start the engine with.
But no sooner had I worked it out, that Bub had struck me on the head with the tire iron, than I saw the rock. Red, Cassandra, and then behind them the long low shelf of rock covered with a crust of barnacles and submerged every second or two in the sea, and we were wallowing and drifting and slowly coming abeam of the rock which looked like the overturned black petrified hull of some ocean-going vessel that would never sink.
Had it not been for Crooked Finger Rock I might have done something, might have reached around somehow and caught Bub by the throat and snatched away the tire iron and flung it at Red. Somehow I might have knocked Red down and taken over the Peter Poor and sailed us back to safety before the squall could threaten us from another quarter. But I saw the rock and heard the bell and Captain Red and Cassandra were posed against the rock itself, in my eye were already on the rock together, were all that remained of the Peter Poor and the rest of us. So I could only measure the rock and measure Red and wait for the end, wait for the worst.
I didn’t want to drown with Bub, I didn’t want Cassandra to survive with Red, and so I watched the hard black surface of the rock and swarthy bright yellow skin of the man, could only stare at the approach of the rock and at what the old man was doing. Jomo had let go the wheel and was watching too.
Because Cassandra was sitting on the edge of the thwart with her head thrown back and her hands spread wide inside the puffy tight yellow sleeves, and because the rust-colored skirt was billowing and I could see the knees and the whiteness above the knees which until now had never been exposed to sun, spray, or the head-on stance of a Captain Red, and because Red had thrown open the stiff crumpling mass of his yellow skins and was smiling and taking his hands away.
“There ’tis,” he said.
And that’s when I should have had the tire iron to throw, because there it was and I saw it all while Cassandra, poor Cassandra, saw only Red.
Because she looked at Red, stared at him, and then pulled the string yet gave no sign that she knew the black sou’wester was gone or that she cared—but I did, I watched it sail up, roll over, shudder, actually land for a moment on the rock, slide across the rock, drop from sight—and then she pulled at the knot of the pale blue kerchief and held the idle tip of it between two fingers for a moment and then let it go. Drop of blue already a quarter mile astern and the hair a little patch of gold in the wind, the sun, the spray, and the white face exposed to view.
“No, no,” I said thickly, because she had reached out her hand—bobbing, swaying, undisturbed—and had drawn it back and was extending it again and Red was waiting for her.
“Cassandra,” I mumbled, “Cassandra,” but the buoy began to toll and Bub hit me again with the tire iron. So I went down and took her with me, pulled her down into my own small comer of the dark locker that lies under the sea, dragged her to rest in the ruptured center of my own broken head of a dream. Waxed sandwich wrappings, empty brown paper bag, black sou’wester, kerchief—all these whistled above her, and then I was a fat sea dolphin suspended in the painful silence of my green underseas cavern where there was nothing to see except Cassandra’s small slick wide-eyed white face lit up with the light of Red’s enormous candle against the black bottom, the black tideless root, of Crooked Finger Rock.
The squall came down, I know, because once I opened my eyes and found that I was lying flat on my back in my oilskins on the floor of the cabin, was wedged into the narrow space between the bunks and was staring up at the open companion-way which was dark and filled with rain. The rain beat down into the cabin, fell full on my face, and I could hear it spattering on the pots and pans, driving into the piles of blankets thrown into the bunks. The black brassiere was circling above my head and lashing its tail.
We were offshore, three or four miles offshore in a driving squall. We pitched, reeled, rolled in darkness, one of the rubber hip boots fell out of the starboard bunk and down onto my stomach and lay there wet and flapping and undulating on my stomach. At least something, I thought, had saved us from a broadside collision against Crooked Finger Rock.
And later, much later, I awoke and found that they had hoisted me into the port bunk, dumped me into the bunk on top of the uncomfortable wet mass of blankets. I felt the toe of the other rubber boot in the small of my back, the tight sou’wester was still strapped to my head. And awake I saw the low and fading sun on the lip of the wet companionway, felt the tiny hand on my arm and managed to raise my eyes.
“Skipper? Feeling a little better, Skipper? We’re coming into port now, aren’t you glad?”
Wet, bright. Uncovered. The small white face that had been cupped in the determined hand of unruly nature. Little beads of sea violence in the eyelashes. Wet bright nose. Wet lips. Bareheaded, smooth, drenched, yellow skins open at the little throat, hair still smacking wet with the open sea and sticking tight and revealing the curve of her little sweet pointed skull. And smiling, Cassandra was smiling down at me. But she was not alone.
“Red—Captain Red—has been teaching me how to sail. Skipper.”
And moaning and licking my sour lips: “Yes, yes. I’m sure he has, Cassandra. That’s fine.”
The Old Man of the Sea, timeless hero of the Atlantic fishing fleet, was standing beside her with his pipe sizzling comfortably and the blood running back into the old channels, and I knew that I could not bear to look at him and knew, suddenly, why everything felt so different to me where I lay on the tumbled uncharitable blankets in the wet alien bunk. The sea. The sea was flat, smooth, calm, the wind had died, the engine was chugging so slowly, steadily, that I began to count the strokes.
“Ahoy, Peter Poor!” came the far-off sound of Miranda’s voice, and I knew that Cassandra was right and that we were heading into port, heading in toward our berth at the rotten jetty. Peace at last.
But then: “Skipper? Are you well enough to show Red what you have on your chest? I’d like him to see it if you don’t mind.”
Resisting, mumbling, begging off, trying to push her little hand away, but it was no use of course and she peeled away the layers and smoothed out the hairs with her own white fingers until the two of them leaned down together—two heads close together—and looked at me. Their ears were touching.
“That’s the name of my husband. Red. Isn’t it beautiful?”
He agreed that it was.
“Where’s the Salerno kid?” I asked, and it was a thick green whispered question. “Don’t you want to show him too?”
But Red was already helping her up the ladder and we were coming in.
And then Miranda was waving from the end of the jetty: “Ahoy, Peter Poor, welcome home!” And half a dozen stray young kinky-faced sheep were huddled in front of her on the end of the jetty and calling for mother.
“Boy, oh boy, are you a sight!” Miranda said. And then they kissed, and from where I sat propped on the jetty I looked and saw our skins piled high amidships on the Peter Poor. Our wretched skins. And above the pile with the black strap looped over his steel hook and the rest of it hanging down, Jomo was standing there and holding out his arm and grinning.
“Got something of yours, Miranda,” he called. “You want it?”
And laughing, and arm in arm with Cassandra: “You bet your life,” she cried, “bring it along!”
Silence. Shadows. A moonlit constellation of little hard new blueberries against the picket fence. An early spring. The glider was jerking back and forth beneath me and grinding, squeaking, arguing with itself like a wounded crow. And the bottle of Old Grand-Dad lay at my foot and I sat with glass in hand.
“Now go to bed, will you, Skip? My God. She’s probably gone to the show with Bub. That’s all. What’s wrong with that?”
The Labradors came out of their kennel, one head above the other, and looked at us—at me in the painful shadows of the glider and at Miranda sitting on the porch rail with her head against the post and one big knee beneath her chin—and sat down on their black bottoms and began to howl. The Labradors, Miranda’s blunt-nosed ugly dogs, were howling for my own vigil and for Miranda’s silhouette, because Miranda was wearing her black turtle-neck sweater and a Spanish dancer’s short white ruffled skirt which the raised knee had slipped into her solid lap like a pile of fresh white roses.
“Even the dogs know she’s not with Bub,” I said, cracking the neck of the bottle quickly and gently on the lip of the glass, “nobody can fool those dogs, Miranda. Nobody. They’re not howling for the fun of it.”
Wasn’t she looking at her fingernails in the moonlight? Wasn’t she studying the tiny inverted moonlit shields, one hand curved and fluted and turning at arm’s length in front of her face, and then the other, peering at her enormous hands and yawning? Of course she was. Because it was May and time for Miranda to appraise her big waxen fingernails by light of the moon. And even in the chill of the late May night I knew there would be no goose flesh on her big waxen silhouetted leg, no hair on the smooth dark calf.
“You’re an old maid, Skip. Honest to God.”
And staring out at the chestnut tree that was trying to pull itself into leaf once more, I lifted my chin and smiled and drooped the comers of my mouth: “I’m afraid I can’t say the same for you. Far from it. But I tell you, Miranda,” tasting the iodine taste of the Old Grand-Dad on my heavy tongue, sitting on the head of a spring and holding it under, “I’ll give her five more minutes, just five, Miranda, and then I’m going to Red’s shack and pray to the BVM. that I’m still in time.”
She laughed.
But I meant it. Yes, I meant still in time, because there had been the rest of March and April with no more mishaps, nothing but Cassandra suddenly light on her feet and fresh and helpful around the house, Cassandra spending all our last days of winter walking from room to room in the old clapboard house with Pixie held tight in her arms and some kind of song just audible in her severe little nose. Now it was May and Cassandra had changed again and as I must have felt and was soon to know, it was the last of my poor daughter’s months. So still in time. I needed to be still in time. Because of March and then May and then June and the last thoughts, fragments, high lights of the time that swept us all away.
“Laugh if you want to, Miranda,” I said. “You have nothing to lose.”
“For God’s sake, Skip,” looking my way, plucking the ruffles, resting a long dark hand on the angle of the silhouetted thigh, “and what about you, Skip? What about you?”
She must have known what I had to lose since she destroyed it for me. She must have known since she arranged for the destruction, nursed it, brought it about, tormented both herself and myself with its imminence, with the shape of the flesh, the lay of the soul, the curving brawn that was always gliding behind her plan. And what a vision she must have had of the final weeks in May, since the abortive outcome had already been determined, as only she could have known, on a windy day in March.
So I was about to tell her what I had to lose, was sitting forward on the edge of a broken-down glider and collecting myself against the loud irritating pattern of her asthmatic wheeze—she was still propped on the veranda rail with her long heavy legs exposed, but she was wheezing now, staring at me out of her big dark invisible eyes and wheezing—when the black hot rod shot around the comer by the abandoned Poor House and roared toward us down the straightaway of the dark narrow dirt road, honked at us—triple blaring of the musical horn—and disappeared among the fuzzy black trunks of the larches which were tall and young and mysterious in our brimming spring. And I jumped from the glider and reached the rail in time to see the fat anatomical silver tubes on the side of the engine, the silver disks masking the hub caps, the little fat squirrel tail whipping in circles on the tip of the steel aerial, and, behind the low rectangles of window glass, the two figures in the cut-down chariot for midnights under a full moon. It was traveling without lights.
“You see?” I said, “there she goes! And with Jomo—in Jomo’s hot rod, Miranda—not with Bub. Who’s the old maid now, Miranda?”
Old Grand-Dad flat on the floor. Kitchen tumbler sailing out and smashing, splintering, on the roof of the kennel. And I was off the porch and once more running after my destiny which always seemed to be racing ahead of me on black tires.
“Wait a minute, Skip,” she cried then, “I’m coming with you!”
